Dwelling alone or together: An integrated framework of peer victimization, (co-)rumination, and mental health

Why do some youth suffer debilitating depression or anxiety after being victimized by peers yet others grow hostile? Why do some youth dwell alone on their problems (rumination) yet others dwell with their friends (co-rumination)? When does talking to friends about problems (e.g., victimization) help or hurt?

Despite the serious (and potentially long-lasting) consequences of peer victimization, these questions remain unanswered.

We lack a detailed understanding on how victimization, (co-)rumination and mental health co-develop, or when and why their associations differ between individuals.DWELL moves beyond the state-of-the-art to address these questions in three work packages. WP1 examines individual differences in the pathways between victimization, rumination and mental health.

In contrast to existing work, WP1 focuses on why some victimized youth, but not others, ruminate about their victimization – even years later as adults.

In WP2, I put forth a new conceptualization of co-rumination - as a dynamic process that can vary within a person across their friendships, rather than as a static trait. Towards this aim, I introduce a novel co-rumination measure that captures who co-ruminates with whom.

By identifying a network of co-rumination ties, this also allows for ground-breaking insight into how co-rumination spreads in a peer group.

WP3 integrates these findings into a holistic framework, accounting for the temporal ordering of victimization, (co-)rumination, and mental health.

Through a multi-method design (longitudinal studies, register data, daily diary, observation), and a novel co-rumination measure, DWELL explains individual differences in day-to-day, short-term (~1-year), and longer-term (up to adulthood) effects of victimization and (co-)rumination on mental health.

This framework will help prevent suffering of victimized youth, and has far-reaching implications for non-victimized youth who engage in (co-)rumination in response to other stressors.